How we can develop metro app for Windows 8 in under 4 minutes or less ?

Developer Evangelist, Michael Palermo kicks off his new series today where he shows us how we can develop for Windows 8 in under 4 minutes or less. Today’s topic? How to get started developing your Windows 8 app by downloading and using Visual Studio Express.

Next Steps:
Step #1 – Download Windows 8 Release Preview and Windows 8 SDK
Step #2 – Download Visual Studio Express for Windows 8
Step #3 – Start building your own Metro Style Apps for Windows 8

If you're interested in learning more about the products or solutions discussed in this episode, click on any of the below links for free, in-depth information:

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Sideloading a Win8 Metro LOB App for Testing Purposes

The Scenario

Sideloading is the term used for installing a Windows 8 Metro App without downloading it from the Windows Store.  Why it made me think of a line from Happy Gilmore, I’m not sure, but I’m going with it.  Sideloading is going to be a typical deployment scenario for line of business (LOB) apps, because they will be targeted and controlled and not meant for the general public.  While there is a fair amount of documentation on this topic and deployment in general, getting the steps straight for testing my proof of concept (POC) on a tablet without using Visual Studio took a little more thinking and tinkering than expected.



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Making your Metro Icons Circled using Paint.NET: the quick way

In this quick tip I am going to demonstrate how to make your icons with a circle around using Paint.NET. Here are a few examples of when you would need a circle icon:

  

NOTE: This post is not about App Bar Icons but about Metro Icons in general! The circle displayed on each button is drawn automatically by the Application Bar and should not be included in the source image!

NOTE: Paint.NET is a free image and photo editing tool for Windows released under Creative Commons license. So you are free to build whatever icons/images you prefer and use them in your WP7 apps! For more information you can also take a look at our previous post:  Creating WP7 Tile and Application Icons for FREE with Paint.NET

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Nullable Dependency Properties and Binding

Author’s Note: If you’re here just for a solution and are not interested in the extraneous bits, click here to jump to the workaround details.

First, some background…

Let’s say you’re building a user control and one of your control’s properties needs to be a three state boolean (true, false, null).

No sweat, we’ll just create a nullable boolean (bool?) dependency property:

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public static readonly DependencyProperty ValueProperty =     DependencyProperty.Register("Value",         typeof(bool?),         typeof(TestControl),         new PropertyMetadata(null));

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Windows 8 Simulator : Explored

You may be thinking to yourself: “Self, I’d really like to get into Window 8 Metro style, but I don’t own a touch screen device or tablet. So, I’ll just wait until I get one.”

Wrong answer!

If you’re serious about app development, you’ll want to start now to get a jump on everyone else. And, believe it or not, you can start with what you already have.
The built in templates provide most of what it takes to make a good touch first app.  For most scenarios, sticking to the templates is the wisest course of action.
To see how your app will behave when your app is on a slate, you can use the simulator that’s built right into Visual Studio 2012.

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Async Task.Delay In C# Metro Style App Explained

Internal code for Task.Delay (.NET 4.5)
How to implement Task.Delay in 4.0
How NOT to implement Task.Delay 4.0.
Returning a Value
Dealing with Exceptions
Example Usage
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Building Pie Chart for C#/XAML Windows 8 Metro Style App

I came to a point were I need to use a Pie chart for a Project if you tried to search online you will not find a free charting control so I decided to build one. there is a huge modification in .NET 4.5 framework specially when it come to Paths and drawing because of

• Different namespaces
• Performance enhancement
• etc…

so I decided to build a charting library on my own and here I’ll give you an initial start on build a Pie Chart

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MetroGridHelper for WinRT, a helper to get the alignment right

It’s already more than a year ago that Jeff Wilcox wrote the MetroGridHelper for Windows Phone. I’ve been using it a lot since then. But we now have the option to build WinRT applications, sadly without the MetroGridHelper.

Wait no more, I ported the code from Jeff and also modified it to fit the metro guidelines that exist for WinRT applications. I’ve had some help from Martin Tirion and Matthijs Hoekstra, both working as Evangelist for Microsoft in The Netherlands.

The result is something that helps me during the design of the Windows 8, WinRT, apps.

 
You can simply install the NuGet Package. Through the console like this:

PM> Install-Package WinRT.MetroGridHelper

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